Currently, the remote transfer and display of video data using consumer electronics devices has become a field of significant development. Generally, it is desirable to permit such streaming between devices with different display capabilities. With the advent of different video devices having different video resolutions, it is desirable to compress the video stream thereby increasing the amount of data transmitted to communicate the highest video resolution that can be transferred, yet it is also desirable to permit viewing of such video streams with devices that may only permit lower resolution video streams or may have throughput or slow processing capabilities that render such higher resolution video signals impracticable. These issues have become particularly pronounced with the advent of high definition (HD) video, although the problem should not be construed as being limited to HD video. Thus, scalable video streams are increasing in popularity. In general, a video bit stream is called scalable when parts of the stream can be removed in a way that the resulting substream forms another valid bit stream for some target decoder, and the substream represents the source content with a reconstruction quality that is less than that of the complete original bit stream but is high when considering the lower quantity of remaining data.
The usual modes of compression can result in differences in the amount of time required to encode/decode higher resolution video (which may or may not conform to known “high definition” formats) in comparison to a lower resolution. In systems that support scalable video delays in processing, the video stream for higher resolution video can become a limiting factor in the overall system performance. Thus, the need exists for a way to reduce or eliminate the effects of delays due to compression of video.